I know it's been a long time since I updated my blog. So much has happened since then. Allow me to list the major sign posts in life, which have passed by yours truly since last December 2010.
1. The last remaining member of my immediate family (My Dear Mother) passed away on Saturday November 27th, 2010.
2. My latest documentary production, "A Home is More than Four Walls and a Roof," premiered in Montreal one day before my Mother passed away.
3. I decided to leave the Province of Quebec for good !
My reasons for leaving Quebec were several. I have no family left in the province to hold me there. I couldn't secure enough work as an English language film maker in Montreal to ensure my freelance business would remain profitable. I was promised a large paying documentary by the same producers who paid me quite well for another film production I did, but it never came to pass ! I defaulted on my rent. I ran out of food ! It was a really terrible experience for
me ! Some might be tempted to say predictable, but nothing in life is so. The truth be known, I felt very cheated by living in Quebec all those years ! Living and working, or trying to work in a society, which in practice is quite Xenophobic, and openly hostile to the English language has robbed me of so many contracts for my company over the years, I probably could have been a millionaire by the time I was 30 ! So why did I stay for so long ? I stayed because Quebec was my home. I was born in LaChine, Quebec, on the western outskirts of Montreal. My father moved to Quebec in the early 1960's because Montreal in those years was "THE PLACE" to live in all of Canada !
I wonder if any of my fellow Canadians remember how people from all over the country would pack up and move to Montreal, because Montreal was known as the most affordable place to live in the entire country with a high standard of living, a thriving financial community, a thriving English language community, and a great place to raise a family. In fact, Montreal was the financial capitol of Canada for 150 years until Rene Levesque and the separatist Parti-Quebecois chased away all major investment in the Province by May of 1976 when they first came to power. It can be argued Quebec has never fully recovered from those tragic events beginning in October of 1970 and culminating in Camile Lorin's famous statement "Bill 101 or take the 401 !" Many English language Quebecers took the 401 down to Toronto, or were transferred to some other part of Canada when their company's head offices moved out of Quebec.
I saw so much change in the Quebec of my childhood. I remember as a young child, we English and French kids played together, and we did not discriminate. It was a different mentality back then. I remember my father carrying me on his shoulders through Terre des Homes (Man and his world) during EXPO 1967. I was only 4 years old at the time, but I do remember the great Geodesic Dome of the American Pavilion, and the inverted bowl of the Mexican Pavilion. I remember everyone was wearing those huge Mexican poncho hats with the little bobbles which hung down around the rims of those hats. The West Island of Montreal was overwhelmingly English in its character and population. We had our own radio station called CFOX 1440 AM. They only played the top ten hits of the day, and those hits they played over and over agin. It was Beatles ! Beatles ! Beatles ! all day long. Or the Doors, or The Mamas and the Papas. The announcer used to come on and the announcers in those days used to have catch lines like "How's your budgie ?"
Montreal was so darn cool back then too. John and Yoko had their Bed in for Peace at the Chateau Champlain. This really put Montreal on the world map. So did Expo '67 three years earlier.
Then, one fall Morning in 1970, some angry French Man put 27 sticks of dynamite under my father's office window at Domtar Research in Senneville, Quebec (Western tip of Montreal Island), because he was seen as an English intellectual, and an oppressor of the French people of Quebec by a group of French radicals who called themselves Le Fondation Liberation du Quebec, or FLQ.
YUP. The Canada hatred really fired itself up in Quebec during this period. As I recall those times as a young child growing up in that society, it was the first time I remember French and English language Quebecers began to look at themselves as two separate societies instead of one under the Canadian Flag. As a child, I never understood, and I still don't, why the FLQ chose to murder a French language member of the Quebec provincial parliament ? Labor minister Pierre LaPorte was strangled to death and left in an abandoned car on the outskirts of Longeuil, Qc. http://archives.cbc.ca/war_conflict/civil_unrest/topics/101-611/ more I want to say about my onetime home and birthplace, but I will leave that for another blog. I remain hopeful of the future and it's high time I went fourth and saw a whole lot more of this beautiful big country of ours.
HAPPY CANADA DAY EVERYONE !!
Mark Job
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